Page 222 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Hanspeter Kriesi

Low Accessibility of State Actors

France, Ireland, Austria, Belgium, Denmark,
Greece Portugal Finland, Norway,
Sweden
Majoritarian Consensus
United Kingdom, Germany Netherlands
Democracy Democracy
Spain
Italy (since change Switzerland
in electoral

system)

High Accessibility of State Actors

Figure 8.3 ATypology of National Political Contexts for Western
European Countries

Combining the two dimensions we arrive at four theoretical combi-
nations. Majoritarian democracies of low and high accessibility versus
consensus democracies of low and high accessibility. Any specific case
resembles more or less one of these ideal types. Figure 8.3 presents the
distributionoftheWesternEuropeancountriesonthesetwodimensions:
We can assume that the public sphere in general and top-down strategies
of going public in particular will be more important in majoritarian
democraciesthaninconsensusdemocracies.Theconcentrationofpower
in the hands of a few individual actors at the top of the respective in-
stitutions creates the necessary preconditions (prominence and pres-
tige of individual personalities). It is hardly an accident that the public
sphere plays a particularly important role and that the strategies of
going public are particularly well developed in the United States, which,
according to this classification, is a majoritarian democracy. By contrast,
such strategies remain the exception in Switzerland, the paradigmatic
case of a consensus democracy. In the Swiss case, the direct-democratic
institutions impose additional constraints on such strategies. The direct-
democratic procedures are issue specific, which prevents a far-reaching
personalization. Moreover, they allow for a quasi-institutionalized going

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